Joe Biden and the 'at least he means well' presidency
What Perry Bacon Jr. gets wrong about the president's unpopularity
My wife and I have an inside joke about a relative who sometimes ends up being a pain in the butt despite what often seem to be good intentions: “He means well.” It’s a way of acknowledging that this relative doesn’t necessarily mean to be malicious, but that intentions only go so far. What matters is what actually happened.
I thought of my relative today when reading Perry Bacon Jr.’s column today at WaPo, charging the media with the failure of Joe Biden’s approval rating. Biden is now less popular than Trump was at a similar point in his presidency, and Bacon — quite rightly, I think — finds this incredibly frustrating. “You can’t credibly argue that Trump, with his constant inflammatory statements and incompetent management, was a better president than Biden,” Bacon writes. “These poll numbers reflect something gone wrong.”
He says the media should reframe its coverage:
Yes, I am calling for the media to cover Biden more positively. Not in the sense of declaring Biden a better man than Trump (though that is obviously true). Instead, political coverage should be grounded in highlighting the wide range of our problems and assessing whether politicians and parties are working toward credible solutions. Such a model would still produce a lot of stories about surging inflation, Afghanistan and other issues where Biden’s policies haven’t worked. But there would also be more stories about other issues important to Americans, even if they were going well under Biden (like the huge job growth during his tenure). Ideally, on every issue, the media would compare the Republican and Democratic solutions. You can see how this model might help Biden — but the bigger benefit would be to readers.
“Ideally, on every issue, the media would compare the Republican and Democratic solutions.” That’s a good idea, but also: I suspect voters don’t care so much about comparing solutions from the respective parties. They just want solutions, and when they don’t get them the party in power gets tossed out. (This, incidentally, is why Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell would rather skip the whole “let’s tell voters our agenda” thing during the midterm campaigns. Making promises means voters can compare solutions — and why give them that opportunity?)
At its heart, though, Bacon’s proposal is the “he means well” model.
Because if Democrats have better solutions — as Bacon assumes — and voters are still angry, that means that voters don’t think the problems are solved. Instead, what Bacon wants is for the media to offer an implicit promise about Joe Biden: If he could solve things, he would. Bacon’s proposal would assure the American public that, well, at least Dems’ hearts are in the right place.
The raises an obvious question, though: Why aren’t things getting fixed?
Most obvious is that not every problem has an obvious or easy solution. Inflation, for example, is the problem that voters seem to be most angry about — and understandably: When prices go up faster than wages, what most families experience is a loss of buying power. Nobody likes that! But solving inflation isn’t really something Biden has a lot of power to do, especially in the current moment when so much of the problem is driven by supply chain issues, the war in Ukraine and other matters that the president can’t merely flip a switch to fix.
But there’s also the problem that the system, as currently constructed, isn’t really built to solve problems all that well. Our Constitution doesn’t seem to be up to the task.
Take Congress. To pass a law, you have to get majorities in two houses — the House of Representatives and the Senate. Assume you’re lucky and have those majorities. (And that’s a big assumption: I present you with the case of one Sen. Joe Manchin.) That’s still not enough, because the Senate has a de facto supermajority requirement in the form of a filibuster. In our system of checks and balances, the legislative branch checks itself twice. That makes it difficult to get much done except pass defense funding bills, the one thing that everybody seems to agree on.
Because Congress is so gridlocked, the presidency has moved to assume more powers to itself, through executive orders and the administrative state. This isn’t always necessarily a great thing, and in any case the conservative Supreme Court supermajority has decided in the recent EPA case that the president can’t do that. Which is also a problem.
Again: Biden’s problems — and the problems faced by Democrats — aren’t entirely structural.
It remains the case, however, Congress has a hard time doing much about some of our big problems. And the president can’t step in to the degree he’d like. All that’s left are challenges and good intentions. No amount of “he means well” media coverage will make voters happy about that.